Agenda

Road Movie

The Cinémathèque at the Abattoirs

Les Abattoirs
Auditorium
Cinémathèque rates

Hit the road. To flee. Or escape. Chased or to forget. Choosing to wander, when there's no other choice, when things smell rancid. And head for freedom. Even if it means ending up in the background. Leave everything behind. And again, step on the gas and drive, drive, don't gather any moss. Nonchalant or, yes, speedy dog. But you need movement.

The road movie is a purely cinematic genre. Perhaps the most cinematic. Because it is a genre of movement. In motion. Just as cinema is movement. It is also, and above all, a purely North American genre. The mechanised continuation of the western. The Americanised continuation of the picaresque novel in the age of the automobile. The famous car that the new world has made the symbol of individual freedom.

And the road movie was born with the 1960s, on the cusp of the triumphant car, embarked on by Bonnie and Clyde for a wild ride stranger than paradise. And perhaps it will end with the advent of electricity, because everything has to come to an end, whether it's an escapade or a cabal. You're here, you're gone...

We're on the road. We set off with freedom. On roads that maps don't know. Ways that don't recognise the law of maps. We set off in stealth mode. Fugitive. Come and see. You'll see, the air is crisp. There's movement. And it feels good. You run the risk of hitting a wall, but that's OK. There will be movement. On your way.

Programming :

Bonnie and Clyde
Arthur Penn
1967. USA. 111 min. Color. DCP. VOSTF.

The bloody odyssey of a legendary couple. More terrorists (1970s extreme left-wing version) than gangsters, the American Robin Hoods of the 1930s. And it was a big hit that established a certain trend in road movies - the pair of bank robbers on the run - while at the same time bringing to the genre a new aesthetic of violence, baroque and choreographic, as later developed by Sam Peckinpah. Above all, it's a story about a couple, a powerless man and a frustrated woman. A couple escaped from Kazan's who seek to resolve their sexual problems in Peckinpah's film.

Thelma and Louise
(Thelma and Louise)
Ridley Scott
1991. USA. 129 min. Color. DCP. VOSTF.

The fury of life in a convertible version. Two friends, Thelma and Louise, take to the roads of Arkansas. First saloon, first stop and first trouble. A unique women's road movie from the director of Blade Runner. Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in the lead roles, and Brad Pitt as the sexy hitchhiker. Two heroines who take up arms against male violence. With Thelma and Louise, Ridley Scott reversed the roles, triggered unprecedented controversy in Hollywood and redefined the place of women in genre cinema.

River of Grass
Kelly Reichardt
1994. USA. 76 min. Color. DCP. VOSTF.

Kelly Reichardt's first film. Cozy and Lee meet. She is in a passionless marriage and ignores her children. He is unemployed and has just picked up a gun. Naturally, they're on the run. Ordinary America, the land of poverty and boredom, seen as an endless suburb. Motels, motorways, then motorways and motels, with the suffocating presence of swamps. A real fake road movie that constantly plays with the clichés of the genre. A work that is always on the move and yet almost motionless, starring the losers of the American dream.

Sailor and Lula
(Wild at Heart)
David Lynch
1990. USA. 124 min. Color. DCP. VOSTF.

Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) love each other madly, totally and absolutely. But Marietta, the young girl's psychopathic mother, has other ideas. Will love triumph? Can the Good Fairy save the couple? Set between New Orleans and Big Tuna, Texas, this is a fascinating plunge into the well of neuroses in 1980s America, as well as a nail-biting retelling of The Wizard of Oz by Master Lynch. Confusing, frenzied, poetic, surreal, romantic, sexy, electric and violent. Never has equipment been so wild!

The film is forbidden to minors under the age of 12.

New York-Miami
(It Happened One Night)
Frank Capra
1934. USA. 105 min. B&W. DCP. VOSTF.

The war of the sexes won't happen! A film that is part romantic comedy (of which New York-Miami is one of the earliest prototypes), part screwball comedy (dry, sharp dialogue) and part road movie (two characters unleashed on a wild ride on the open road). Capra fuses genres and orchestrates a spirited, subtly erotic fugue of love. Social barriers are shattered, and the love of laughter wins out. Ellie runs away from her millionaire father and decides to head for New York. On the bus, she meets Pete, an unemployed journalist...

The Wild Ride
(Badlands)
Terrence Malick
1974. USA. 94 min. Color. DCP. VOSTF.

Terrence Malick's first feature film. A dazzling, fateful, inescapable and meditative work. Inspired by a true story - the bloody cavalcade of Charles Starkweather and his companion Caril Ann Fugate - The Wild Ride traces the murderous odyssey of a couple on the run in Middle West America in the 1950s. Between Kit (Martin Sheen), a poor man's James Dean lookalike, and Holly (Sissy Spacek), a naive young teenager, it's a story of love and blood. Malick never judges actions, preferring to meditate on the human condition.

The film was banned for under-12s at the time of release.

Perdita Durango
Álex de la Iglesia
1997. Spain / Mexico / USA. 125 min. Color. DCP. VOSTF.

Álex de la Iglesia's only foray into American territory. Sex, drugs and blood. When a crazy couple, drunk on occult rites and love, burn up the asphalt dragging two kidnapped WASP teenagers along the road. Kidnapping, torture and sacrifice make for a trashy Romeo and Juliet with a real kick. In David Lynch's Sailor and Lula, Perdita Durango was portrayed by Isabella Rossellini. Here, it's the feline Rosie Perez who takes on the role. Certainly one of the most excessive films of the decade.

The film was banned for under-16s at the time of release.

Stranger Than Paradise
Jim Jarmusch
1984. USA. 90 min. B&W. DCP. VOSTF.

On the fringes of the American dream, driving towards the great nowhere... A Wendersian wandering. Godardian dialogue. Bergmanian silences. Robert Frank-style photography. And the nonchalance of Nicholas Ray. A young Hungarian woman arrives in the United States to visit an old aunt living in Cleveland. But first she stops off in New York at her cousin's house... From New York to Florida, via Cleveland, Jarmusch reinvents the road movie. A cassette of Screamin' Jay Hawkins in the tape recorder, a carton of Chesterfield and the silence of wandering...

The Voyage of Fear
(The Hitch-Hiker)
Ida Lupino
1953. USA. 71 min. B&W. DCP. VOSTF.

The phenomenon of a filmography (Lupino's) that favoured female roles above all else. The Mexican desert, three men and a gun. An exemplary build-up of testosterone-fuelled tension. Dryness of means and dialogue: seventy minutes stripped down to the bare essentials for a thriller divided into short scenes of alternating light and shadow. A killer who apparently never sleeps and his two prey. The sadistic game is set in motion and runs at full throttle at the pace of the stops and bivouacs.

Little Miss Sunshine
Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
2006. USA. 101 min. Color. DCP. VOSTF.

In the Hoover family, I'd like the father, desperately trying to sell his ‘Nine-step road to success’; the mother, hoping to conceal the failings of her suicidal brother; the son, who communicates only by notepad; and, of course, the daughter, aged just seven, who dreams of being a beauty queen. And for the title of Little Miss Sunshine, the whole family piles into a rusty van for a tragic-comic three-day trip. Between tenderness and pure vitriol, the wonderful adventure of a delightfully dysfunctional family.

Vanishing point
Richard C. Sarafian
1971. USA. 99 min. Color. DCP. VOSTF.

A fast-paced, freewheeling road movie! When an ex-Vietnam veteran and stock-car champion bets that he can get from Denver to San Francisco in less than fifteen hours at the wheel of a powerful Dodge Challenger. More than a film, it's a deliberately uncontrolled libertarian drive, served up by a plot as linear as a line of tarmac lacerating the desert. Born to Be Wild or No Future, both, Captain! As the miles and encounters go by, the legend is written while sketching the portrait of a breathless America.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Sam Peckinpah
1974. USA. 112 min. Color. DCP. VOSTF.

One million pesos to the man who brings back Alfredo Garcia's head,’ shouts the father. And so the wild horde from all over the country set off on a manhunt. Bennie, a failed pianist, knows a bit more. Losers are bound to get lucky one day, he says to himself. And so begins a journey of no return. A macabre, oozing, dusty, sticky road movie. A little masterpiece that begins as a morbid quest, continues as a moribund descent into hell and ends with a deadly thirst for vengeance. A must-see. Impeccable. Indispensable.

Not suitable for children under 12 at the time of release.